Unfortunately this is the end state for many gig for hire apps, uber, tasktabbit etc, I think food delivery is probably the worst because the customer does not interact with the contractor at all, compared to other apps, so you can’t even hear if the driver is getting ripped off on their end.

The tip stealing thing felt very similar to one thing I noticed last night during NYE was certain friends who used uber more had to pay higher for the same rides as me who never uses the app. There’s so much data singling both drivers and consumers out to maximize returns, it’s crazy

Priority delivery has nothing to do with "speeding you up" on Uber Eats. It means you won't get bundled with another order and come second. So far I have never gotten that when I used it, and I did when I didn't. So that rings false. Also his other complaints are literally just every business in the world and how they act. As long as I value the service they give more than the total end money they take out of my account I can pay attention to the fees for myself. I know they aren't my friend.

Probably spam. Author spread it across a lot of subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/

It was removed from all but one, so no mods of any community were able to verify identity (stuck in automod queue for some).

While I'm happy to believe any/all of that might be true, accepting unsubstantiated stories like this isn't a great idea. You really need to start with the assumption that all stories like this are fake until some kind of evidence is provided.

If I was going to do some kind of exposé of my employers I'd at least include some semi-obfuscated screenshots to add some credibility to any claims I might make. Sure, things like that can be faked but it at least would require more effort to do all that (and make them appear credible) vs just a bunch of raw claims.

(I also don't think it's a great idea to judge claims based on how believable you personally find them. That often just leads to confirmation bias as you're just reinforcing your own biases).

"I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, [..]"

The first paragraph already triggers all the red flags that the story is made up.

> First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

It isn't at least for Wolt, which sells it as "delivery direct to you from the restaurant", rather than the delivery driver also doing other deliveries in parallel. This is quite easy to confirm given the realtime tracking of driver (and your food not being cold because they stopped at another restaurant on the way and had to wait 20 minutes).

> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore.

If you didn't care, you'd post the names

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563

Takeaways:

Always tip in cash and never through the app

Don’t use priority delivery

This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563

Also, why did the URL not change to old.reddit?

This is why I give cash to delivery drivers.

No I will not tip in app, that is obviously a scam.

Saying “we call them human assets in the database” is a dead giveaway the author is lying.

No sensible food delivery company would do such a thing - it’s a scandal waiting to happen - so the maximum number of companies that would ever do such a thing is either zero or one. Therefore claiming they’re called “human assets” in the database would instantly uniquely identify the company and the company could then correlate with recent resignations and sue the crap out of this individual for violation of the NDA that they are making very clear they’re aware of and are knowingly violating.

Any sensible engineer would know all of this and would not divulge such a conspicuously specific tidbit. No matter how drunk they are.

Therefore, nothing else this person says is credible. Therefore I call bullshit on the whole thing.

Is unionizing in the Gig economy possible?

its an awful coincidence that this sounds exactly like what id imagine the output of chat gpt to be after prompting to write creatively about the topic at hand

There’s a tendency to treat the recent Uber revelations as uniquely egregious, but this framing misses the more important point: the egregiousness is not new, only the vector has changed.

Consider the nomenclature. Even during the Kalanick era, when “move fast and break things” was operational doctrine, you would not have seen internal naming this careless. I was there. We called drivers “supply” and riders “demand.” Clinical, yes, but accurate and apolitical. The language reflected the business model without editorializing about the humans within it.

What’s worth examining is not whether Uber engaged in questionable practices. Of course they did, and of course they still do. The real question is why the practices look different now.

Growth stage vs. profitability stage.

Uber in 2013-2016 was optimizing for growth. Uber in 2025 is optimizing for profitability. These are fundamentally different objective functions, and they produce fundamentally different behaviors. The perverse incentives remain constant; the tactics they generate do not.

Here’s the key distinction: growth-stage illegality and profitability-stage illegality carry asymmetric risk profiles. When Uber was in growth mode, the company had optionality. Infinite capital and public goodwill meant the growth team could deploy aggressive guerrilla tactics to enter new markets, absorb the legal consequences, and move on. The expected value calculation favored action.

Profitability-stage Uber has no such luxury. The levers available to a mature company fighting for margin are few, and they all point in the same direction: the humans. Drivers. The “assets.” When you squeeze there, you’re not circumventing a government. You’re directly degrading the livelihoods of your own platform participants. The reputational and regulatory exposure is immediate and personal.

This brings me to Spain.

When Spain blocked Uber from operating, we did not wait for lawyers to navigate the legal system. We shipped a technical solution. I watched this happen in real time.

Here’s what we actually built:

The goal was simple: keep the Uber app functional for Spanish drivers and riders despite the government blocking our server IPs at the network level. We needed a system that could rapidly distribute new, unblocked IP addresses to every app in the country without requiring an app store update.

The solution was a Lua interpreter embedded in the Uber app paired with a gossip protocol for peer-to-peer distribution. The Lua compiler allowed us to push executable code to the app dynamically. No app store approval needed. It was essentially a remote code execution backdoor into our own app, which was both brilliant and terrifying in hindsight. When a user opened the app, it would fetch and execute Lua scripts that contained the latest routing logic and server whitelist.

The workflow once it was live: when Spain blocked a batch of our IPs, our infrastructure team would publish a new IP whitelist. That list would seed into the gossip network, where each active Uber app became a node, sharing the updated configuration with other nearby apps. The propagation was exponential. Within hours, millions of devices had the new routing information. The Lua script would compile the updated whitelist and redirect all trip service requests to the unblocked servers.

The tech stack was essentially a censorship-circumvention system: Lua for remote code execution, gossip protocol for decentralized distribution, and a dynamically compiled IP whitelist that the app used to route around the blockade. Same playbook Tor uses for bridge distribution or how Telegram distributes proxy servers to users in Iran and Russia.

The Spanish government quickly realized they had exhausted their options. We forced the outcome, Uber was unbanned, and operations resumed legally.

Here’s the part that matters: it was illegal, but the illegality accrued to Uber’s benefit without harming users. Drivers kept driving. Riders kept riding. The Spanish government got cast as the obstruction, and Uber was welcomed back as the protagonist.

That’s the difference between growth-stage rule-breaking and profitability-stage rule-breaking. One makes you the hero. The other makes you a landlord squeezing tenants.